Abstract
Crowds outside the Imperial Cinema, Bombay, during the premiere week of Jawani ki Hawa (d. Franz Osten, p. Bombay Talkies, 1935). Image courtesy: The Wirsching Family Archive.
Consider this image from the Bombay premiere of the 1935 film, Jawani ki Hawa. Part of a series of photographs taken by the German cinematographer of the film, Josef Wirsching, it captures the chaotic textures of a crowded moment. Curious future filmgoers are hailed by a movie billboard, even as other passersby are distracted by the immediate presence of the still camera, and disinterested bystanders walk out of the frame. Less noticeable, in the middle ground, stands a policeman in a raincoat staring straight into the camera. He is part of a larger police contingent stationed outside the Imperial cinema to preempt and diffuse any protests against the film by the citizens of Bombay city. In the months preceding the theatrical release of Jawani ki Hawa, sections of the local Parsi population vehemently objected to the fact that the film featured two “respectable” middle-class Parsi ladies—one as a singer and actress, and the other as the music composer. After efforts to ban the film failed, pickets were held outside the theater and at least three persons were arrested. Read in this context, the image becomes layered by a very particular set of histories: histories of community, gender, and the collective affects activated by the cinema.
The image incompletely frames an attitude or, rather, an orientation of bodies and publics that are configured as oppositional by the media event: police versus public, outraged gentry versus tawdry film exhibitors. In fact, the media event in this case began months before the film itself was ready to be screened. But media do not simply produce events or publics. Rather, media engineer and frame social relations, sometimes in high contrast, sometimes in low. The gradient of the affective vector shifts from moment to moment, context to context. The articles featured in this issue of BioScope are interested in questions of how popular cinema, state-sponsored documentary, or sensational television news programs produce significant orientations of social relations and attitudes. The articles also implicitly suggest that we approach media as historically situated assemblages of technologies, techniques, esthetics, institutions, spaces, publics, and affects. This approach might be termed “dispositif analysis,” a method that builds on Michel Foucault’s theorization of the term. In her excellent new book, Fiery Cinema, Weihong Bao (2015) describes Foucault’s approach to dispositif as an “alternative to discursive analysis but inclusive of it,” that not only allows us to “understand the entwinement of heterogeneous elements in specific historical formation in relation to power and knowledge, but it also helps us explore the vastly rich terrain between discursive and nondiscursive, the symbolic and the material, said and unsaid, and visible and invisible” (28). Dispositif analysis privileges historical specificity over medium specificity, media environment over technical apparatus, and is particularly conducive to interdisciplinary insights into the meanings and powers of media forms. In a similar vein, the articles in this issue can be read as individual attempts by authors from diverse disciplinary locations to highlight that “media is what media does,” to paraphrase Sudhir Mahadevan (2016).
J. Daniel Elam invites us to reimagine the legendary anticolonial revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, as a moviegoer and cinephile. The essay builds on oral histories of Bhagat Singh’s admiration and love for the 1927 film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Sulochana-starrer, Wildcat of Bombay (1927), to offer an intricate speculative history of the political significance of esthetic consumption. As Elam carefully demonstrates, texts, films, and star bodies circulate across spatial and temporal boundaries to produce unforeseen urgencies. What would it do to our notions of political thought and praxis if we accepted that Bhagat Singh modeled his revolutionary persona on a Jewish Indian female film star? Stardom, here, becomes an embodied force that leaps out of the screen to take hold of the imagination in varied forms. By situating an iconic and multiply appropriated historical figure like Bhagat Singh within a dense media ecology, Elam critiques academic and cultural distinctions between high and low, the philosophical and the popular, the rational and the emotional.
The next essay, by filmmaker and theorist Fathima Nizaruddin, positions state-sponsored documentary film in India as an actor within a dispersed, though ordered, network of practices that produce a “pro-nuclear reality.” Through assertions of scientific authority and documentary authenticity, pro-nuclear media become co-extensive with direct instruments of state repression and serve to normalize the everyday institutional violence at nuclear project sites such as Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, India. Based on the insights of her doctoral film project, Nizaruddin presents us with a tactical response to hegemonic media—the formal-epistemic logic of tamasha as filmic practice. Recent studies of state-sponsored documentary traditions in South Asia, particularly the corpus of the Films Division of India, alert us to the manner in which specific formal strategies and governmental policy have consolidated a readily recognizable non-fiction form with claims to semiotic authority. The author’s thesis film, Nuclear Hallucinations, systematically deflates these strategies through the parodic tactics of tamasha. This is politics as aesthetic send-up. Of particular note in the essay is a discussion of Vigyan Prasar, “an autonomous organization under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India” which was instituted in 1989 “to take on large-scale science and technology popularization programmes” (
Amrita Ibrahim tackles the temporality of the news event in her article on Hindi news channels and their daily mediation of complex social issues. The essay ethnographically tracks the transformation of news to story, khabar to kahaani, as Indian TV shows such as Aaj Tak’s Sansani frame the travails of eloping romantic couples within familiar narrative tropes of love, betrayal, honor, and crime. The industrial pressures of the 24-hour news cycle and formal preoccupations with “sensational” storytelling, generate a publicity that has immense affective charge and can appeal to motley notions of social justice. Ibrahim takes this line of enquiry further in a move that resonates across this issue—the intermedial and transtextual networks of truth-making that inform each media utterance. She shows us how, even within a televisual world of reenactments and dramatized personal crises, there exists an entrenched faith in the evidentiary status of the photographic image. Indeed, still photographs and legal documents are redeployed from temples and courtrooms in order to authenticate the daily drama of the news “story.”
Anirban Gupta Nigam further unsettles the insular unity of the media object by questioning the very possibility of the media “event.” Where Ibrahim is interested in the production of “scandal” as a narrative affect that can have diffused social impact, Nigam addresses a genealogy of political scandals as a history of failure. The article begins with an assessment of the legacy of the “Radia Tapes Scandal” and interrogates the connection between media systems, modes of governance, and public events framed as irruptions. Do scandals point us to crises and ruptures in political systems? Is the media “leak” a symptom of the instability and vulnerability of corrupt bureaucracies? Responding to theories of governance, paperwork, bureaucracy, and assemblage, Nigam polemically argues that neither activist fantasies of transparency nor anxieties about opacity can explain or resist the enduring power of corrupt systems. He suggests that moments of mediatized rupture should be seen as techniques of “shock absorption,” stabilizing forces that point us toward durational processes rather than singular events.
In our fieldwork section, we feature excerpts from Hira Nabi’s oral history project on cinema theatres in Pakistan. Her interviews with blogger Murtaza Kamran present a fascinating account of the film exhibition landscape of 1980s Lahore. Under the martial regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, Lahore emerges as a tense urban cartography of desire and regulation, violence and invisibility. In Kamran’s memory, to be a citizen of the streets was to be a canny reader of fugitive spaces. Nabi and Kamran retrace the tactical routes that connected cinema halls as temporary havens from religious, moral, and sexual policing. Digressing freely from one fragmented memory to the next, Kamran and Nabi create a dense history of cinema as space, social technology, changeable medium, and carrier of time.
Methods such as textual analysis, documentary praxis, ethnography, discourse analysis, and oral history stand in disciplinary allegiance with questions about adaptation, esthetic strategies, communities, and systems, but together, they allow us to think of media as dispositif. The interdisciplinary insights offered in the articles extend into our book review section with Vijay Mishra’s attentive unpacking of the pleasures of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation. Mishra applauds the depth and density of annotations available in Elison, Novetzke, and Rotman’s scholarly readings of a single film, readings that are only possible because of the authors’ disciplinary expertize in Indology and religious studies. How might a film theorist have augmented such an exercise, is the question that Mishra leaves us with. Clare Wilkinson locates Anand Pandian’s Reel World within two overlapping trajectories of ethnographic enquiry—immersive studies of South Asian film production and broader anthropological studies of craft, while Kartik Nair looks at two new contributions to the field of Indian horror studies—Filming Horror and Haunting Bollywood—which point to the continued relevance of genre-based textual studies even as they open onto questions of industry and circulation.